Finished Conarium, more of a walking sim than anything else, save for a few puzzles. Oddly enough, the puzzles in the last parts were awful while the puzzles in the first part of the game were all quite basic. An average game in the end...

Full list here.

1. The Witcher 3: Hearts of Stone (Death March)
2. Human Resource Machine
3. Shadow Tactics (Normal)
4. Commandos 2 (Very Hard)
5. Witcher 3: Blood and Wine (Death March)
6. Bioshock 2 Remastered (PS4)
7. DOOM (2016)
8. DOOM Eternal
9. Starcraft Prototype RPG (own dev)
10. Mafia 2 Definitive Edition
11. Mafia Definitive Edition

Game #52: Agartha (Prototype) (No Cliché) (2000) (DC)

This is an early prototype of a survival horror game that was going to be developed for the Dreamcast, but then Sega pulled the plug on the console and it never came to be. There really isn’t anything to play here. All you can do is explore a Romanian village. I probably only spent a half an hour looking around and that was it.

Game #53: Mystic Nights (미스틱나이츠) (Kor) (N-Log Soft) (2005) (PS2)

This is a survival horror game for the PS2 that was developed and released only in Korea. I don’t understand Korean so I played this blind and have no idea what it is about. It takes place in an underground lab though, and the acronym DNA pops up a lot in the messages you read, so one can probably guess it’s your typical bio-engineering experiments gone awry scenario.

The word vampire is spoken every now and then too, though none of the creatures in the game evoke anything that one would think of as such. They are extremely bizarre, borrowing from H. R. Giger’s bio-mechanical type of design and other such weirdness. One is a monster merged with a sort of motorcycle for instance with a huge horn/lance thing that it impales you with as it races down the halls.

You start off with a katana and a pistol and as you use the weapons in the game they gain experience and level up, becoming more powerful. Eventually an assault rifle and shotgun are added to the mix, and there is armor to wear as well.

The one thing I didn’t care for too much is that the monsters re-spawn immediately after you leave a room. You can literally walk out the door and go immediately back in and the room is repopulated even though there are no other entrances. The one thing that made this not so bad is that combat in the game is pretty easy and you can grind to level up the weapons or to stock up on ammo or health.

I think I spent nearly 11 hours playing this, though the game is nowhere near that long. I got stuck on a couple of occasions, in no small part due to the language barrier. At one point I spent at least two hours wandering around trying to figure out what the hell I had missed only to find out that I hadn’t talked to someone enough times.

Whether it was one of those times where you just have to keep talking to them over and over again, or if I simply hadn’t done something to trigger the new dialogue all the other times I talked to them I don’t know, but it was pretty frustrating. I thought I was going to have to give up. Perseverance won out in the end though.

A bunch of the cut-scenes, interestingly enough, are hand drawn instead of 3D, which was one of the things I really liked. Overall it’s a pretty mediocre game, but I’m always happy when I can scratch off a really obscure horror game from my list, and beating a game in a language I don’t understand is the icing on the cake.

Games Completed in 2020

Fable III (XB1X)

One of the more underrated games I've played for some time. It's really a great adventure, with a very different story slant compared to most fantasy games. It's not about finding the great sword of ass reaming to defeat some bad guy, it's about achieving an aim, a rise to rulership, where you decide the method and cost to everyone else. A rise to power story. The way of the tyrant is the easy path, keeping your election promises and being a benevolent ruler is the harder or more involved path. A bit like real life. Fable III is a much more successful attempt at trying to do the sort of story that Dragon Age II tried to do.

Overall I think Fable III is a great game (one of the best from the 360) that improved over the earlier parts in almost all ways, yet remaining a western style fable or fairy tale story- whimsical world with very dark themes underneath. Still with that very British sort of Guy Ritchie movie humour. In fact, if you pay attention through these games you will recognize quite a few voice actors from the Ritchie movies (Brick Top from Snatch and Plank from Lock, Stock for example).
Just don't play the series expecting a deep RPG experience, they are closer to action adventure games really- just with some very obvious and straightforward character progression.

The PC version of Fable III is a no-go unless you find a disc version. It currently has no PC digital version available. All that makes the 360 version the way to go, but play it on Xbox One- especially a One X where it gets rendered at 4K and runs perfectly. Plus the 360 discs can be found for only a few dollars, plus the series are all on Game Pass as well.

Batman The Telltale Series (XB1X)

The usual Telltale stuff, but with more graphical glitches. The smoke from Jim Gordan's cigarettes is meant to be translucent but isn't and blocks everything behind it, plus the odd invisible character that you talk to but cannot see. I suspect that budget cutbacks were making themselves felt around this time at Telltale.
The story is okay, it breaks a bit from standard Batman lore (well the stuff that I've read or seen anyway) to tell it's own story.
But it's far from the best that Telltale came out with, well behind The Wolf Among Us and Tales from the Borderlands. Easy 1000 Gamer score on Xbox though, and it was a GwG game so I didn't buy it. So all is good.

Blood: Fresh Supply (GOG)

I've actually been playing this one a few levels at a time since I got it last year on release. In its day the original release was actually the first FPS I ever really got into, having always been an SSI strategy and RPG gamer up until then. To this day it remains one of my favourite shooters, despite not really enjoying old style save scum shooters so much anymore. That's basically why I played I over a so many months- so that it didn't get too stale. It all reminds me of the things I've forgotten about old shooters...like how just poking half an elbow around a corner will draw instant fire from enemies with inhuman reflexes and accuracy. But that's how it was, back then I thought nothing of it.

The Fresh Supply release is obviously superior to using DOS in my opinion. It runs better and looks the same, except higher resolutions sharpens up all the edges. I experienced no issues in the regular levels, but for some reason the Cryptic Passage levels exhibit some graphical glitching for me. I also don't like how the Cryptic levels are just stand alone levels in the add on section rather than linked into an episode. So I decided not to play through the Cryptic Passage levels.

Despite many gamers preference to play these games at the higher difficulties to prove their manliness, I find that just results in lessened experience as the pace slows down from the save/reloading cycle. I prefer the faster paced run and gun style that results from the normal difficulty.

It's called saving....save scumming is a term some silly billies who like ultra hard games made up to complain about people making use of quality of life improvements(such as saving) in games. :)

Some of those levels(that I played so far) seem to be good & there are other ways to play them, and if I were in your shoes i'd try them again...but your call(also I don't see why one would be put off by having to load the games through the map selection menus...seems such a minor thing especially as many older games would load maps that way or even via command line).

Agreed. :)
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(Also if you ever have time you should try the Add-On(unofficial) Death Wish...it's pretty good, imo)

FINALLY beat Assassin's Creed: Origins on PS4. I'm not saying "finally" because it took me so long to finally play it but because the game just kept dragging on and on. I've really been looking forward to this game, alas, it's possibly my biggest disappointment in the entire series thus far.

Briefly put: in my eyes they did here what they do with all the Ubisoft sandbox games: they tried to create a game as big as possible as cheaply as possible. They slapped on RPG-ish shit, reorganised missions as quests given by dozens of NPCs, made the map bigger than ever before, made the combat "soulslike", yada yada yada. My problem: in the process they simplified or broke even those things that had been the redeeming values of the worst in the series thus far and as a result this was the most boring AC game to me since the original Assassin's Creed.

There had of course been repetitive tasks in the previous games but ever since AC2 the devs had been going for increasingly diverse and customised missions with lots of unique stuff going on, much like in the Rockstar games. Here most quests and even main missions do nothing that the generic locations scattered all over the map don't do already. An awful amount of "quests" just add one more enemy to kill or an NPC to rescue to one of the many camps. Often a quest sent me to a camp I had just cleared a few minutes ago and enemies hadn't even respawned yet, so I just went in, snatched the prisoner and walked out without facing any resistance. It's so lazy, players should be offended that that's how Ubisoft decided to introduce the next generation of AC games. But, to be fair, if Origins was supposed to be the series' return to its roots then congrats, the devs succeeded: Origins is just as simplistic and repetitive as the first AC game.

As for the core mechanics: combat is now "soulslike", with lock-on and two attack types but in my opinion this kind of combat just does not fit the AC formula - on the contrary, it's clunkier than before without making combat more deep or challenging than in the later AC games like Unity and Syndicate. Stealth just feels utterly bare bones compared to many earlier AC games - it feels like this one has only a fraction of the options available in some earlier titles and the enemy camps are utterly unimaginative in their design and stealth gameplay is just boring and shallow as a result. And possibly the biggest slap in the face: they basically eliminated parkour, which had been the series' main feature all along. Even the shittiest AC games before Origins had one thing going for them: that getting from point A to point B was in itself fun or at least satisfying. Even in the utterly boring Unity I would enter a comfortable trance-like state as I leapt from rooftop to rooftop through half the city. Yeah, that's gone. Not even the few cities are designed for parkour anymore, the AI doesn't support rooftop chases anymore, virtually all surfaces are climbable now so there's no skill or planning involved anymore at all and, shockingly, there's apparently not a single quest or optional challenge left in the game that tests your parkour skills. Heck, I think there's NO time-sensitive challenges in this one - even in the main quests where time pressure is implied by the plot. So, in this regard: screw this game.

As for the plot: it's quite basic by the series' standards and characters don't get to develop as much as in many earlier AC games. There's some decent writing here, some encounters with historic figures are again quite fascinating, but it doesn't get close to many predecessors and the new hero Bayek, while likeable, is utterly boring and the origins of the Assassin order have been handled as lazily as possible, establishing some things very childishly (example: originally the idea was that assassins symbolically replace a finger with the hidden blade - turns out that Bayek just happens to lose a finger in a fight and then his followers start cutting off their own as a sign of loyalty, aaargh). And the modern day Animus story is just shit in this one and not worth mentioning. They really ran out of ideas for those.

Anyway, so the one thing the game really has going for it is the world. It is utterly gorgeous and I've taken far more pictures using the game's photography mode than I thought I would. Exploring a fairly authentic reconstruction of ancient Egypt was what kept me going but it was not worth putting as much time into the game as I have.

Cthulu Saves the World

I believe I read somewhere that Zeebok games didn't release this game on GOG because they didn't want to make sure it was playable on Windows 10, the game runs fine on my crappy Windows 10 powered laptop however. I'm not the biggest fan of Lovecraft, however I was a fan on Zeebok's Penny Arcade series of games, and I was happy to find this game is of a similar style. The story is basically Cthulu wants to destroy the world, but then a wizard removes all his power, and the only way to get it back is by becoming a 'true hero', and the majority of the game is spent performing heroic deeds.

It is a classic JRPG style game inspired by JRPG's of the SNES era. Combat is similar to that from the Dragonquest and Breath of Fire series, with the added turmoil of enemies getting stronger after each round. The one advantage this game has over other JRPG's is speed, no absurdly long attack animations, no loading screens, if you want a quick adventure to get through there's very little hassle to be had with this. The game is of a comedic nature, and almost every bookshelf, enemy and gravestone has unique examines. Despite its age the game holds up with no issues.

Con's are the lack of a map, which makes navigating the world a bit annoying. The combat system means you prioritise party members with high damage output, as it's the main way to counter the increased enemy strength over time. The dungeon layout can also be confusing at times. I liked it enough to play it through twice, (there is an alternate campaign with a different party and bosses). I'd recommend this game in a sale, but I definitely preferred the Penny Arcade games.

Kingdom Hearts 3: ReMind dlc (PS4)

I was casually browsing my spam folder when I saw an advert for a dlc for one of my favourite games of last year, I went to the PS Store and saw the price, £25 (For context that's about half the price of the full game on the day of release), I've never spent more than £10 on a dlc, but my fanboyism persuaded me. The DLC is basically there to explain what happened between the 2nd to last cutscene and the final cutscene, and is basically a 5 hour version of the final level, with some extended cutscenes and the ability to fight the bosses as a different character. There are 2 new bossfights, but they are nothing special and a bit annoying. After finishing this, I was absolutely furious that a dlc that consisted of rehash's and stuff from the cutting room floor cost so much. I started to write this review whilst the credits playing, the credits ended and it said "You have unlocked a new episode".

This episode is basically 13 harder versions of bossfight's from the last level, but with added mechanics. The fights are tough, and to defeat all 13 requires great skill. After you defeat all 13 a cutscene plays at the end that seems to tease a KH4 or future dlc, then the cutscene turns into a fight you're meant to lose, and a final cutscene plays. After that I thought "This still wasn't worth £25", went back to this review when... "Secret episode unlocked". It turns out the fight was winnable after all, this superboss is one of the hardest in the series, it teleports constantly, drains max hp, steals your recovery items (And uses them) and has very few opportunities to hit combo's against them. After spending 3 days learning the mechanics and finally beating the boss, I saw another cutscene and then I thought the dlc was finally finished. But no, the dlc has also added a buff/debuff system, that makes the game much easier/harder depending on what buffs/debuffs you select, if you want to get 100% achievements you also have to beat the game with all debuffs on. It feels like this dlc was a direct response to complaints the KH3 had no 'superbosses' and the floaty combat meant boss's had very little challenge.

Of course we then get back to the issue of cost. £25 is an extortionate amount for a dlc, and I still think it's a rip-off. If you're not that good at the game, and you brought it, you've basically spent £25 for a dlc geared towards the hardcore fans who life difficult bosses, fortunately I fall into that category. Unless you are desperate to play this dlc, I would recommend you wait until the price goes down.

Game #54: Wolfenstein 3D Expansion: The Nocturnal Missions (Id Software) (1992) (DOS)

This expansion acts as a prequel to the original game and is basically just more of the same but without the more interesting enemies you’ll find in the original and Spear of Destiny. I would say that both this and the Spear of Destiny expansions are just for those who are really big fans. Everyone else should just play the main campaigns. It took me maybe 2.5 - 3 hours to play this as I’m not one of those people that has to find all the secrets. I mostly just love shooting Nazis in the face.

Game #55: Zaphie 2: Resurrection (제피 2) (Kor) (MiraSpace Entertainment) (2002) (WIN)

After my success with the last Korean survival horror game, I decided to give this one another try. The first game, which I had finished many years ago was just a 1st person slideshow adventure game like the original Myst. This one is third person with tank controls and plays more like the early Resident Evil or Silent Hill games. That said, the primary emphasis is on exploration and solving puzzles. There are very long stretches with no combat at all.

This game was extremely difficult for me to finish. My hardships with that Mystic Nights game were a joke by comparison. You absolutely need to know Korean to solve some of these puzzles. I was stuck for hours just trying to figure out what I was suppose do in a single puzzle.

The only way I managed to get through it was to take a screenshot of the Korean, use an OCR program to convert it to text, and then run it through machine translation only to find out that OCR has a pretty high error rate and the translation was close to useless. I then went online and found a Hangul character map and scoured the thousands of symbols looking for the right ones that OCR misidentified and eventually got a poor but vaguely understandable translation that I was able to figure out.

There were other puzzles that, while not as extreme, were much harder due to the language barrier as well. I honestly can’t believe the lengths I went to to finish this game. I truly never thought I would ever get to the end. That said, I did miss something as you collect pieces of something called the Holy Rune Arc throughout the game and I missed one. I don’t know what they were for. Do you get a different ending? Do they just affect combat in some way? I have no idea.

One thing to note is that the game doesn’t play well with modern computers. It crashed a lot and the videos rarely played for cut-scenes. Unless you’re an absolute masochist like me, I wouldn’t recommend you play this game unless you can read Korean.

I’m going to drink heavily now and my next game is going to be in English and very casual. I need a break. I’ve earned it.

Games Completed in 2020

Heretic. I had played the shareware of this a little bit back in the 90s but I figured it was time to actually play it. It's basically just Doom but with a fantasy theme, which actually isn't saying much since Doom is already pretty much fantasy once you get past the Mars/sci-fi stuff. The weapons more or less map to the chainsaw/pistol/shotgun/etc. style, (I've always loved the lightning gauntlets, though) but it adds an inventory so you can use certain items when they might be helpful.

I found the level design a bit more straightforward than Doom's in that every once in a while in Doom you might get a more puzzle-like level and Heretic doesn't really go for that, which is fine with me since the appeal is running very fast and shooting stuff. I had a good time.

Gato Roboto. This is a fun Metroid game while it lasts. You control a cat who uses a suit of power armor to explore a strange planet, with the twist being that you'll sometimes have to jump out of the armor and just be a cat, or use another vehicle in certain parts. The graphics are entirely black and white and are solid but not extraordinary pixel art. My favorite part of the presentation is the sound effects, which have a nice crunchy quality.

The only issue, and it might not an issue for some people who just want something fast, is that it's very short. I started playing it a couple of nights ago, got about 90 percent of the way through it, and then finished off the final boss last night. About 3 hours of playing time. It's also pretty easy. I died a handful of times, mostly on bosses whose patterns I was figuring out, and after a couple of tries I'd get it down and continue ahead.

Finished Dirt 3: I won (1st) all the races in the Dirt Tour. I am not a fan of racing games but this one was good for me.

Full list here.

Realistically, I probably won't complete too many games in 2020 looking ahead, but...

"Include me"

anyway. ;) First one locked down:

Children of Morta (thanks to Doc!)

On the whole I really loved this game. I think my quibbles would be

1) the beginning is slow,
2) in line with #1, a few of the melee characters are pretty underwhelming until they hit lvl 10-12
3) The controls are always a bit middling for an action RPG, but for a few abilities they're especially clunky
4) The ending of the narrative felt not just completely against the flow of the game ...but related to the work I do IRL it's a let down. Can't really say more without spoilers, but yeah, it left a bad taste.

Still, otherwise, I really enjoyed the ambiance, and the combat is on the whole quite fun once you have your abilities - Lucy in particular. If she'd been available from the beginning I probably would have played her primarily - the mix of abilities, and her little yips and noises were charming.

On the whole I'd it's worth checking out, despite the art being hit/miss and the combat being slow to get going (and then if you invest too much gold skilling up and playing alts for the family boosts, arguably a bit too easy).

Thanks, Doc!